The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Published 1964 · 66,275 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Poetics of Space to read?
The Poetics of Space scores 70 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Phenomenological and poetic vocabulary together.
- Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
- Long French sentences, lyrical rather than analytic.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- Space treated as a property of imagination rather than geometry.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with quotation from dozens of poets.
How The Poetics of Space is regarded
The Poetics of Space holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.